I’m Jessica Sterling, a portrait and event photographer based here in Los Angeles. Today I want to talk a little bit about how to set your pricing. The question “how much should I charge?” It would be so fantastic if you could just live and not have anything to do with money. It would be just wonderful if everything was free, right? I like free stuff. Everybody likes to get things for free.

But, you’re a professional artist. That means that you need to get paid. It’s part of the balance of life.

Many artists are just too modest and they don’t charge enough to make a living wage. There are some artists out there that are huge megalomaniacs, and they want to get paid $5k a day just because they rolled out of bed.

This is a really touchy subject for a lot of artists particularly, because it starts to get really emotional.

You Deserve a Fair Exchange

If you do good work, you deserve to get a fair exchange. You need to know that down to your toes. “Yes, I am producing something that’s valuable, and I should get return for it, in a business environment.” A business relationship should be fair to everyone involved. It’s not an emotional thing. It’s not “Oh, well they really don’t like me that much” and “I’m really not that good, so they probably shouldn’t pay me that much.” It’s not about that. If you give somebody something that they need and want, it’s only fair that they pay you for it.

Of course, it’s important to be really good at what you do and pay your dues. But you don’t have to be a masochist about it, and work 80 hour weeks and get paid what you should have earned by working two hours. That’s ridiculous, how can anybody survive like that?

You have to have a little bit of attitude, be a little bit of a pirate. Say, “Hey, I did this. I deserve some fair exchange!” If you only charge 1/10th of what you should charge, then you won’t be making enough money to have any free time.

How to Find the Right Price

You find out what people charge in your area and you see if you match their level of awesomeness, experience and expertise. A smart thing to do is figure out how much things cost you to produce. How many hours does it take to produce this particular product that you’re selling? If you go to a job, there’s travel time, there’s preparation time. There’s picking up extra rental equipment. You have to factor this all in. If you have to pay somebody to help you with certain things, an assistant or retouching or anything. Obviously, if you’re a one man band, you have to factor it in as if you were paying somebody to do those things for you. And if you’re the one who has to do them, how much do you want to get paid as an hourly rate?

I think that’s very smart to then set your prices based on that. This way if somebody asks you to work for a rate that just isn’t fair, you’re confident in your rate because you’ve already worked out the numbers. I, personally, have a number that I keep in mind. If I work for less than, I know I just won’t feel good about it.

Why You Need to Find the Right Price

If you take a job that you feel like you’re not getting paid enough for, it’s not fair to your clients because you’re going to wish you weren’t there. But, you always have to do top level work. You don’t want a potential client to see your shot and think that your work isn’t that good. They don’t know that you only charged 1/3 of what you normally charge. They’ll just see this low quality picture.

If you’re going to produce the product, and you know you’re going to put in this amount of time, you have to charge for it so that way you feel it’s fair. If you take a job that’s below your normal rate, you have to just put your all into it anyway. No matter what. Because that’s what you agreed to do. You’ve got to stick to it and say, “You know what? Suck it.”

So that’s my advice. Put your all into every job that you do, but be fair to yourself too.

I hope that was helpful for you to find the right price for your work. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and follow our blog to keep up with all of our content. And remember to get out and capture your own images of life.